Making the MacBook Air Great Again

An eleven year old MacBook Air gets a makeover

Last month, I purchased one of my favourite old gadgets: an eleven inch MacBook Air. I’ve always loved the original design MacBook Air: that wedge shape, the solidity and — with the eleven inch model — the sheer cuteness factor. A late-night foray onto eBay got me this beauty for £80:

The mid-2013 MacBook Air. Image source: Author

For those of you who aren’t in the know, this is a mid-2013 MacBook Air, with a 1.5Ghz dual core Intel i5 processor, 4GB of soldered RAM and a surprisingly generous (and user upgradable) 256GB SSD. How far can this machine go with a little love and care in 2024? There are some good videos detailing the technical side of similar projects on YouTube: go to them if you want to go in depth. What follows is a not-very-technical person’s effort to document a month-long journey to see if this beautiful piece of equipment can hold its own long after Apple dropped official support.

The Starting Point

The device was running MacOS 10.15 Catalina. The previous owner hadn’t wiped the device — contrary to what they thought they’d done — so I had to system restore from Mac OS X Mountain Lion. I eventually got a boot installer downloaded to update the machine to MacOS Big Sur: the last officially supported version of MacOS.